


The Judgment in Paris

by scioscribe



Category: Hilary Tamar Mysteries - Sarah Caudwell
Genre: Extra Treat, F/F, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Vacation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-05
Updated: 2018-09-05
Packaged: 2019-07-07 02:37:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15899187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “The first time, of course,” Selena had maintained for several years, “it was entirely by accident.  Julia had spilled a glass of wine—”The desultory nature of conversation then always required Selena to clarify whether she meant that Julia had spilled her own wine or—equally likely—someone else’s.  A second bottle, since they were on the subject now, should be ordered for the table.  Further quarrels as to the nature of property would then ensue, as a complication emerged: it had been Selena’s wine, but given briefly to Julia so she could taste it.  (“It was an exceptional vintage,” Selena always said mournfully.  “I think of it still.”)





	The Judgment in Paris

**Author's Note:**

  * For [untilitbleeds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/untilitbleeds/gifts).



“The first time, of course,” Selena had maintained for several years, “it was entirely by accident.  Julia had spilled a glass of wine—”

The desultory nature of conversation then always required Selena to clarify whether she meant that Julia had spilled her own wine or—equally likely—someone else’s.  A second bottle, since they were on the subject now, should be ordered for the table.  Further quarrels as to the nature of property would then ensue, as a complication emerged: it had been Selena’s wine, but given briefly to Julia so she could taste it.  (“It was an exceptional vintage,” Selena always said mournfully.  “I think of it still.”)

But the most pertinent fact of the wine was that it was a Bordeaux quite incompatible in color with Julia’s cream-colored blouse.

Selena said, “I was only trying to help her remove the stain.  So naturally we were crowded around the sink—it was a rather small toilet—and Julia had her blouse down soaking and I was scrubbing at it with salt.  It was strenuous, so I stopped to rest—”

“Which gave her time,” Julia said, “to notice that my bra was likewise stained.  And it was a very attractive one, peach satin.”

“Gorgeous,” Selena agreed.  “But just as I was drawing Julia’s attention to what had become of it, someone opened the door.”

“You didn’t think to lock it?” Ragwort inquired.  “With Julia _dishabille_?”

“And sitting half in the sink,” Julia put in.

“It really didn’t seem like that kind of party,” Selena said.  “I was under the impression anyone wishing to come in would knock.  The tap was on, after all.  But civilization has fallen.  I think that’s a greater concern than whether or not anyone stumbled into the toilet and saw Julia partly undressed with my hand, well, roaming.  But the whole situation seemed much too complicated to explain.  Clearly, since I’ve been telling the story for half an hour.  It seemed more important to salvage our reputations.”

“I didn’t think Selena ought to be known for casual affairs in loos,” Julia said severely.  “So we let it be known that we were on terms of the most intimate friendship.  It was a mere momentary convenience.”

“Which has become a regular deception,” Ragwort said.  Buying the next round allowed him to stand and have his full height to drive home the force of his disapproving gaze.  “You shouldn’t mislead people.”

“Well, I’d like to know what we should do, then,” Julia said.  She sounded cross.  “You will always have men who can’t be told that they in particular are repugnant to you.”

“When the knowledge that you have considered them in particular at all,” Selena said, “is tantamount to encouragement.  You have to disapprove of the whole class to be allowed to refuse a single member.  After a certain point, you have to weigh honesty against expediency.  Though neither, I’ll grant you, is much of a virtue where sex is concerned.”

This status quo lasted them quite a while.  Luckily, Julia said, they were the single point of intersection of many of their social circles, which mathematically must mean that they were often the most popular people they knew.  This had its misfortunes—being so often called upon to tender cool but not devastating rejections—but also its blessings, and they did it more and more frequently.  All was well until Paris.

Ostensibly they shouldn’t have needed to fake anything in Paris.  They were there for pleasure, not business, and as much as one is always going to Europe and running into people one knows at home, Selena and Julia were experiencing the rare holiday in which that wasn’t the case.  No ties needed to be maintained, so any unwanted attentions could simply be strolled away from.  And no scandals needed to be averted, because no one in Paris would ever condescend themselves to be shocked by an Englishwoman.  Everything should have been perfect.

They found themselves having a miserable time.

“There should be something artistic about an unfortunate Parisian holiday,” Selena said.  “Because at least you are being unhappy while eating exquisite trout amandine and you can walk around congratulating yourself on being thoroughly individual and unmoved by all the arguments that get pushed on you that Paris ought to thrill you.”

Julia agreed that this was so.  She looked down listlessly at her trout amandine, which really was exquisite.  “Though,” she said, with the air of someone making a significant clarification, “we aren’t artists.  We have the education and perhaps the sensibility—”

“Of course.”

“—but we’re much more practical.  I for one would rather have a good time than feel nicely about having a bad one.”  She punctuated this with a toss of her hair, which she had, in Paris, been wearing exclusively in an affectedly careless bun copied off the covers of French magazines; she had been trying all the while to make tendrils fall about her face in a coy manner and had most often only succeeded in making herself look rather unkempt, a harried barrister who had fallen asleep on her desk waiting for an important Telex to come in.  At the moment, though, Selena was struck by her.  Julia seemed right then to have a perfect cameo shape, to be all high cheekbones and slender throat and defiance, and the wisps of her escaped hair, though not coy, were satisfyingly Classical, like unruly snakes against the temples of Medusa.

It gave Selena ideas, at least one of which she was willing to voice.  “You’re absolutely right.  I propose we liven things up with a game.”

“I’m very bored with Scrabble,” Julia said.

“Not Scrabble.  Does it strike you that neither of us has made a single conquest here?”

“Yes.  It strikes me frequently.  It strikes me, not to put too fine a point on it, every evening right before I fall sleep and occasionally when we have a long pause before dinner.”

Selena was not sure that the image this suggested constituted an idea, so she continued.  “We’ve come to a stretch of bad luck as far as sex is concerned.  Continuing to try, even casually, amounts to dwelling on it.  So naturally we wind up melancholy.”

“So you propose we cast aside any thought of men,” Julia said.

“Aside from whatever reflections you use as, ah, sedatives, yes.  We cast them aside so thoroughly that we actively work to prevent such opportunities from arising, to wit, we begin to share a room.  We hold hands at dinner.  As often as that is feasible, considering we’ll both have forks and knives to manage.”

Color suffused through Julia’s face like, appropriately, Bordeaux through a cream-colored blouse.  It livened her.  She appeared to be on the verge of a massive reorganization project.  “That’s an excellent idea.  It’ll be like putting on one of those dinner-theater mysteries.”

“Only as a romance,” Selena said, “which no one is paying for.  And at no point,” this more for the universe’s sake than Julia’s, given the luck that had hounded them over the last few years, “should a corpse appear.”

“At _no_ point.”

Selena reached across the table and took Julia’s hand.  Each individual finger was like a piano key; touching her should have produced music audible to Selena alone.  She brushed her thumb over Julia’s knuckles.  It was important to be convincing.

Julia’s appetite returned with a vengeance.  She devoted herself to her trout amandine, hanging on to Selena’s hand all the while—a water glass, and the dryness of the tablecloth, was sacrificed to the cause—and beamed at the waiter when he came by to present with the bill.  Her smile endeavored to ask if he had ever seen two young people so much in love.  She scarcely even noticed his Apollonian profile.

The rest of their day was spent strolling arm-in-arm through English bookshops.

“It’s difficult to pretend to be in love in a bookshop,” Julia said reflectively.  “For one thing, you seem notably more in love with the books.”

“My dear Julia, it’s a relationship of much longer standing.”

“Nevertheless,” said Julia, who had not yet found a book to her liking, “I’m inclined to feign jealousy.”

“You would feign it much better if you didn’t announce it was false,” Selena said.

Conceding this, Julia moved about the bookshop with a slightly put-upon glower on her face.  She had done a certain number of amateur theatrics in her youth and had been devoted to facial expressions, often to the detriment of blocking; now, as then, she did not entirely see where she was going.  She bumped into the corner of a display table of cookbooks and then subsequently into a wire display of paperbacks.  Eventually, however, she was able to unearth a biography of Sir Thomas More that she thought herself interested in: she folded herself up in an armchair and devoted herself to it.

An agreeable quarter of an hour passed and then she was interrupted by Selena, who stood above her wearing a dark silk swing dress and carrying a book of Anthony Trollope’s letters and a mystery with a smearily-printed cover.  The latter looked appealingly decadent.  The overall picture was appealing.

Selena extended her hand.  “Allow me,” she said, “to fund your afternoon’s pleasure.”

Julia could not fail to rise to that flirtatious tone.  She was aware of eyes on them: the two well-formed young Englishwomen, pretty and professional yet decidedly, ahem, _demi-monde in inclination_.  The game was afoot.  She handed over her biography of Sir Thomas More, who would not have approved of all this but who was not her guiding council in _personal_ matters.

“Fund as you like,” she said, “but I think either way, you are the pleasure of my afternoon.”

Selena flushed.  Julia’s tone was theatrical; her voice pitched to carry.  This had, of course, been her idea, but she had forgotten how quickly Julia could make a good idea into something of a public event.  But, looking at the golden bracelet dangling from Julia’s slim outstretched wrist, she had to concede that even the public nature of this game had been her own doing.  You could not pretend without an audience.

She bought the books.  They left, pointedly hand-in-hand.

“Did I go too far?” Julia said when they were out on the street.

“Not at all,” Selena assured her.  “A light touch is overrated.  And you didn’t deflower me in front of the mystery section.”

“I think virginity is required for it to be a deflowering.”

“Well, it’s almost virginity, if all your experience goes in another direction.  Past school, of course, where the proceedings lacked both a certain eroticism and a certain coordination.”

“Those awful narrow beds,” Julia said, shuddering.

They had not gone to the same schools in their youth and now each thought about the other in that respect, erasing, naturally, the spots and coltish awkwardness they had actually had.  It was impossible yet tempting to think that they might have been in the same place at the same time in those days—and lonely.  Or at least bored.

It could not be said, of course, that either was bored or lonely now.  There was no deficit in life to be accounted for by seizing upon the nearest companion like a piece of flotsam.

Therefore it was, for lack of a better word, interesting that Selena should notice Julia, and Julia Serena.

There was no real need for them to share a bed that night—the game would have been satisfied, the hope of outside liaisons prevented, by them merely sharing a room—but they wound up together all the same.  Complaints were made.  Julia’s feet were like icicles and she insisted on shoving them between Selena’s ankles to warm them.  Selena stole three-quarters of the top sheet.  It could not be said that the bed was narrow, and this was to be resented.  It was, if anything, a little too wide.  Neither could touch the other by accident and once Julia’s feet were warmed, they were short on excuses.

In the morning, Julia rumpled the sheets and rolled around in them to dislodge them still further.

“For the maid,” she said.  “To substantiate things.”

“Naturally,” Selena said, looking at Julia’s hair down around her bare shoulders, her silk pajama top pulled to the side by all this exercise, exposing much of her collarbone.  She said, with false brightness, “Let’s find a party for tonight.”

“I am somewhat in the mood for free champagne,” Julia said.

Breakfast was had via room service, in the messy bed.

“I always order crepes in Paris,” Selena said, “and I should stop, because in point of fact they’re one of the few bits of French cuisine you can reliably find anywhere else.”  She had powdered sugar on her lips.  At that moment, as the maid walked in, she leaned over and kissed the corner of Julia’s mouth.  Substantiation and the taste of _citron et sucre_ : ample payback, she thought, for Julia’s display the day before.

Julia’s lips were now slightly glazed, as, with presumably less cause, were her eyes.  Housekeeping departed post-haste, having had this sort of thing happen before.

Selena and Julia read in the park that afternoon, their ankles discreetly touching.  They tried on clothes they could not afford and often did not particularly want, though Selena was piteously drawn to a feathery concoction that would have cost her a month’s salary.  Julia petted her hand to console her for its loss, feeling this was what a particular friend would do in such a case.  She poured forth exuberant compliments on the wardrobe Selena already possessed and demonstrated a frankly encyclopedic knowledge of it and what it did for Selena’s eyes, stature, bearing, and bust.  The intimate reassurances of such a friend could not help but be cheering.  Clothes were purchased for that night.

And they found their party.

It was hosted by a friend of a friend of a cousin of a client—so satisfyingly obscure a connection, Julia said, that they could not really embarrass themselves and she would probably not be asked for free tax advice—and was something in between an orgy and a garden party, altogether a broad and forgiving stretch of evening entertainment.  Anything might happen, which was exciting, but wouldn’t, which was reassuring.

They both wore their newly-acquired dresses, Julia’s black and elegantly cut, with a slit partway up her leg, Selena’s a garnet color with a small amount of beading.

“Are we lovers still?” Selena said, watching Julia put on her earrings.

“I don’t see why not,” Julia said.  “I generally find fiction more relaxing for vacations anyway.  And look, I chose my jewelry to match your dress.”  She flicked her earlobe back and forth, the little garnet pendant catching the light.

“I’m lucky to have someone so thoughtful in my life.”

“Darling, we’re lucky in each other.”

Without agreeing to it beforehand, Selena and Julia nevertheless fell into the kind of obnoxious, treacly fawning exclusive to newly in love couples and happy marrieds who soon find themselves short on friends.  It was nothing so obvious as Julia sitting nearly on Selena’s lap or Selena toying with those wispy escaped tendrils of Julia’s hair.  They were subtle.  Eyes lingered on stocking-seams, on the way Julia slipped off one of her shoes under the dinner table and dug her toes into the plush piling of the rug.  Attentiveness, unusually single-minded, shone in Julia’s eyes as she listened to Selena’s account of her last, and tiresomely Wordsworthian, holiday in the Lake District.  It was a rare lover who could hear her beloved define the term _genius loci_ without averting her gaze in search of other amusements.  Julia proved very rare indeed.

The flat belonged to Piers, the aforementioned friend of a friend of a client’s cousin, and his interest in Selena and Julia had faded steadily away as it had become more and more apparent that neither of them would be very likely to shed her clothes by his bedside that night, but the Lake District revived him and he _would_ insist on talking to Selena about it, which he did for a thorough quarter of an hour.  Even Julia’s eyes glazed over.  Conversation was rescued and returned to gossip and triviality by a knife-faced chocolatier who asked Selena and Julia how they had met.

Julia, bravely, audaciously, said, “How we met, or how we began seeing one another?”

It was not a circle to find abrupt personal disclosures awkward: they were all English, but they were, they wanted to stress, Englishmen and -women completely and entirely at home in Paris, yes, they could discuss sex along with poetry.  People would insist on reciting Allen Ginsberg and hinting darkly that they owned multiple volumes by the Marquis de Sade.  They would not be discomfited by two well-dressed professional women keeping each other company.

They did not even, Julia noted, inquire as to her interest in Selena’s ideals and aspirations.

“Whichever story is more interesting,” the chocolatier accordingly said.

“Well,” Selena said.  She did not know how she would finish the sentence once she had started it, but she prided herself on having certain talents in court and those skills did not desert her now: she found her most plausible and convincing argument.  “Julia spilled her wine.”

Julia had already knocked over a bowl of potpourri, so everyone in the room found this reasonable enough.  Inasmuch as you could have a chorus of nods, one ensued.

“I went into the toilet with her to help her scrub out the stain.”

“Salt,” someone in the back advised.

“Yes, we took the shaker in.”

“And of course the blouse had to soak,” Julia said, “and one thing led to another.”  She sipped her wine demurely.

Selena wished, quite suddenly, that she would spill some.  Just a drop or two.  Not that it would have much effect on the black dress, which was nearly Julia-proof.

“Rather _warm_ in here, don’t you think?” someone muttered to Piers before drifting off.

Julia, looking that way, stood up so swiftly that Selena nearly did get her wish of the spilled wine—but while Julia’s movements were bold, they were uncharacteristically well-judged.  She simply stood, excused herself, and went off to the toilet with her wine still in one hand.

It surprised no one that Selena slipped off after her.

“Sans salt shaker,” Piers observed, and returned to his party.

Selena did not knock, feeling that they were beyond that now, civilization having fallen, et cetera.  She found Julia gazing listlessly into the mirror, her wineglass balanced on the edge of the sink alongside a bar of soap.

“I think,” Julia said, her voice not precisely steady, “that I may have miscalculated… certain things.  Do you suppose there’s a metaphorical reading of this situation where the fiction turns out to be based very closely on a true story?”

In the mirror, Selena could see herself smile at that, could see Julia smile in response, on and on, reflected endlessly.  “Why not?” she said.  “Hilary writes novels about us.  It’s only natural that life should gradually begin to imitate art.  Though, damn it, Julia, I wish we were anywhere but Paris, it’s _such_ a cliché.”

“I know,” Julia said mournfully.  “We could always start saying it really did happen the first time I spilled my wine, and we’ve only been pretending to be pretending.”

“An Ouroboros of deceit,” Selena said.  She was tempted, but not so much by that as by other things.

They did manage in the end to upset Julia’s glass of wine, though this time the stain was on her skirts and neither of them paid it much attention, as their minds were entirely elsewhere.  The sink proved capable of bearing a certain amount of weight.

“Must history always repeat itself?” Ragwort would say later, when this account, much censored, wound around to the toilet door being yet again unlocked.  “Did you learn nothing from the first time?”  And Julia responded that yes, obviously, they had learned everything from the first time, but just not that.  And besides, it really was polite to knock.  That could not be stressed enough.  As before, in the case of the running tap, the noises alone really would be enough for anyone to know that the room was already quite occupied.


End file.
